Playstation Mobile, A success or failure?

The Playstation Mobile Dev toolkit Beta has closed quite a long time ago, by this time I expected that there would have been loads of new Indie games and apps but today when I switched over to my US account after updating to 2.00, I saw that not many apps are available. I feel that Sony has made a BIG mistake by making PSM a paid service and for forcing approval to publish.

I saw more apps coming out when the toolkit was in Open Beta. With the Open Beta, all people had equal access to the toolkit and could do whatever they wanted, but with the closed version, very few people have the time and money to sign up and develop apps for PSN for which they can be sure that the app will be approved

The PSM was the perfect idea, the ability to access a lot of the abilities available on the Vita yet ensure that there were no piracy but, then Sony made the careless mistake of forcing India devs to pay $100 for the toolkit!

Sony should have kept it like J2ME for smartphones, download it anywhere and just install but they decided to keep the system in their control, to make sure that they earned as much money as possible. During the open beta, we saw some very creative apps ,

a Remote Desktop application, an all region Playstation store ‘hack’, the cool games even the demos like the flight simulator, just imagine how much more the Vita would sell if PSM was open, developers would want to buy a Vita so that they could make software for it, we would get our homebrew, Sony would get their sales.

So, I feel that Sony has wasted a perfectly good idea by making PSM a paid service. What do you think? Post your opinion here or at the forums here

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50 Responses

Although I agree on the fact that it is mostly a failure, I disagree with the reason you give. 100$ a year is what Apple charges for deving on the iPhone. The problem is that with the PSM, people get access to about 5 million users tops, which is roughly 100 times less than the iOS user base.

To me that’s the main issue here, and I don’t think lowering the entrance fee would change much (at last for quality releases)

Have the Sony phones and tablets really sold that little? PS Vita is around 2.5 million units sold now maybe, i don’t think that their phones and tablets has sold only 2.5 million. Some HTC phones is (or at least will be soon) also supporting PSM.

What no “first” wololo? (I never understand the need for someone to post first, we have eyes.we can see who is first) anyways I agree with wololo its the user base not the publishing fee that’s hurting psm

I actually agree with him Wololo. The Vita is way too young of a system to force people to pay to design apps. Your right that the iPhone development kit costs 100, but the iPhone had a massive following behind it with the iPod and they knew they would sell the iPhone/iTouch like wildfire. Sony on the other hand has sold dismal numbers in the Vita. Sony just does not have the luxury to charge for a service that they sorely need to revitalize the Vita. They would make more money off of Vita sales and a cut of every app on PSM more then they would the $100 PSM costs. Its just a matter of Sony’s bad marketing and sales implementation. I swear that company is still in a 90’s mindset.

Also I hate to double post, but there is the fact that there are only 2-5 million Sony devices out there. The chances of selling an app via PSM is lower then to apple, and yet they cost the same entrance fee. By that thinking, Sony is a no brainier avoidance. Sony needs to sweeten the pot to make PSM appealing, and the only real way to do that is remove app approval (which they will never do, it would finally give everyone home brew emulators which for some reason Sony considers heresy…), or drop the $100 fee.

It doesn’t have to be iOS/Android or Sony devices though, it is possible to release the games and apps on all the devices. I think that many (or maybe all) of the PSM games that are released so far also excist for iOS and/or Android as well.

for me if the PSM year fee is 0 or very very low (5$ or 10$ for year) more user can decide to make an app for PSV, but 99$ is a very expensive fee for a no sure repay for this fee, but i have a metod for share app maked with PSM without pay the fee, and probably more home developer use my same method for share the app.

The whys of this seem pretty obvious, Sony doesn’t want us to figure out the security in their devices, or for us to produce exploitable software… Also, Sony enjoys raping wallets, it’s kinda their thing.

Not really, the reason for this is the same reason as the fee for iOs development and the fee for Steam’s Greenlight. It is to prevent millions of “press a button to make a fart sound” and apps of a similar level of intelligence flooding the PSN. Let’s say a thousand developers buy the license, which I think is quite a lot to expect, that would net Sony about 100.000 per year. That seems like a lot, in fact it is for most people, but it’s really not for a multi billion dollar company like Sony.

Indeed at first glance it seems a paltry sum to a company like sony, but when you are a company as big as sony, you can make a thousand small fees and price hikes, then suddenly the figure has a few more zeroes. In reality I was being overly dramatic about it for personal amusement, but there is definitely a grain of truth there. I bet they take a percentage of your sales too, there might even be something in the license agreement that says anything made with the sdk is theirs – that way they can swoop in and take anything truly profitable. Big companies do this stuff all the time. But that is all just guesswork. I haven’t actually researched PSM at all. I would like to say that I have always hated apples policies around software development, and ios devices do not get an exception. I’ve used Ipods, Iphones, Ipads, and I am not impressed. Since so many people with no researching skills exist, it’s not surprising that steam is making a name for itself by making so many games accessible to the unskilled. A few hours of searching around will turn up lots of good games that arent on steam, and I don’t like having an extra layer of programming tossed onto my game for no good reason. Steams only plus is their sales, and I’d rather pay full price for worthy indy games to support the developer anyway, if I don’t want to, I’m not going to pay a reduced price, I’m going to pirate it or play something else.

Sony have left the gaming side years ago. All they care abut is the money they can make. It was destined to fail from the start as they will lock it down and not let all the good. Home few apps onto it anyway so PSM will fail and home brew will rise. If Sony were in it for the games and the community then they would let more homebrew on it and have it open and free.

Nobody is in it for the games anymore which really sucks. Even the PS3 devs want money that’s why they made the dongles.

Devs like TotalNoob and teams like Duplex are the scenes gods as they are in it for the game. 🙂

While the price has something do with it, the main problem is that the PSM is limited. I checked out the forums a few days ago, wondering where all the apps are, plus what was happening with remote desktop. However, all I got was complaints by developers that the PSM was too restrictive to do anything with. That, added with the price makes it tough to make anything with.

In my mind, we got one awesome app (remote desktop) that will never be finished, likely because he gave up on the PSM from frustration.

Thats the US public. I got in the beta months ago and it still works for me and has from day one. It even gets updated and all is still good. They did change a few things and apps that did work no longer work. There was an emulator that was nice which no longer works and a few other apps like that.

I really like the PSM idea. It uses C# and $100 for publishing it’s cheap. Do you know that the SDK is free and the annual fee is just for publishing, right? Well, there are some great homebrews, but do you guys thought about how much *** it would be published without the annual cost. About concerns, well, I think that the biggest failure reason is market. Why I would spend time (and money) on a non profitable device such Vita? And besides that, Vita isn’t the only device that supports PSM, so there is too much work for no return. (when I say no return, it’s because I’m comparing PSM and ISO).

Everything I’ve wrote is my opinion, and I’ve never studied English. So please don’t be an ***

I agree with Wololo. Nobody wants to spend $100 for publishing a game on the Vita. Unlike the iDevices, the Vita has a way less amount of users, which means less of a chance to make a profit(or even get their money back). But I think that if the price was reduced to say, about $30-$40, we would see a lot more games and apps.

Hmm I forgot about that. But I don’t think people will pay that much, when they could just publish through Android instead. Much cheaper. The only difference is; they wont get their games on the Vita.

Also, just to add in, when people say $99 isn’t a lot of money, I disagree. I think that that’s a bit too much to pay for getting an app or game published on PSM. I understand if it’s a big thing like Apple(again, more users). But for PSM, which is still in diapers, I think that’s a wrong move.

I see your point, but i don’t think that $99 will be much of a hurdle if someone wants to make a PSM game. It isn’t a huge amount of money and it will hardly affect the budget of the game at all. I’d say that it comes more down to motivation, not that people litterally can’t afford to pay $99 a year.

I dont think that time and money is an issue for most people here. It cost $99 a year, which really isnt much money (depending a bit in which country you live of course, but in most western countries, this is not a lot of money), and signing up for PSM probably wont take a long time. I’d say that it is rather lazyness, lack of motivation and/or financial reasons to develope for iOS and Android instead.

I think it is too early to say if PSM is a failure concidered that it hasnt fully launched yet. As someone mentioned above here, PSM just recently went out of beta. And PSM is not released everywhere yet either.

I dont have any super high expectations for PSM, but i think it can see some success in the long run, especially when trophy support comes.

When they support trophys (something that sony already told that it will be implemented) it will bring cool things.I <3 the PSM and hope that kills the Minis. Hate those stupid expensive (really expensive) Minis (5 dollars for N.O.V.A.? R u kidding me?)

imo the fee should keep the crapplications at bay.. If it was free we would probably already have 5 fart apps cluttering up the catalog. I do wish it was more open though with sony overseeing what goes into the catalog we will never see any apps that compete with sonys apps (read no emulators or better web browsers) also the lack of apps has more to do with the low user base than the $100 publish fee,as pretty much any app can sell enough to recoup $100

I must agree the kit is and was a great idea but It will not go anywhere. The idea is ok but there will be 0 competition between ios and android and possibly windows mobile.For example take a look at similar ideas within the recent years and see where they are now.

After reading all comments, all I can say is that now I’m tempted to pay the registration fee and publish said ‘push for fart’ app to see what happens 😀 Heck, we could also add some modern features like ‘timed fart’, or ‘smile for fart’ (using the camera), wireless controlled fart, etc.

Now ontopic… free until publish is not so bad at all… but maybe the starting price should have been like $50, then they could raise it if too much BS was being submitted. Sony=dumb.

Lol at push for fart app. I would buy it for $0,99. Maybe $50 bucks is the right price to bring more people to develop for the plataform. They need a Black Friday ad =] here in Brazil it’s all about this (but they’re trying to steal us, increasing the prices today to look more attractive to consumers).

Big mistake… PSM should be free because regardless of the thousands of press a button to fart applications they will get money if the app is successful but now they want to rape your wallet and then rape your profits…

I though it was pretty cool that PSM was free and that if i wanted to i could learn to code and make my own calculator, calender, alarm clock apps but nope, you gotta get raped every year if you even want to make a notepad app for personal use.

Failure because the games sucks psp has better games i bought a psm game a puzzle game called underline because it was cheap but i regret i was run out of option because i didnt have that much money by then so i bought that,waste of time i didnt play the game im playing more UMVC3 and LBP and Parasite Eve 1 more than that.

$ony is a total failure, I have psvita, I have Xperia ion, I have ps3, and i have an old psp. At the end of the day I’m questioning myself, “is this all worthy for what I paid for? Sony is a total disappointment for me.”

well the sony mible it self is alright but i think they should have gone driod mode cuz android apps are more seem to be more populer so u think there more dev working on it.. if they fix the android marlet a bit n have more online game play n cross platform play with like apple n outher game devices it be pretty good.. the mobile apps on the psn are actuly pretty good. but the sense that there not to much working on sony moble was wandering wy they dont just have the game sony have for like the experia on there playsation network i would think it be easy to just port the game to the vita.. then atleast they would give people more game option…

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